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Paul Kirkley: Compromise replaced by testing to destruction




I’ve written several times in these columns about the modern craze for testing every blindingly obvious theory to destruction: how, from Trump to Truss, Boris to Brexit, climate change to – it now appears – crumbly concrete, we always have to go through the painful motions of waiting for it all to go wrong, rather than taking the easy route of just heeding the warnings in the first place.

Paul bemoans the modern craze for testing every blindingly obvious theory to destruction.
Paul bemoans the modern craze for testing every blindingly obvious theory to destruction.

And to that list, I suppose we should now add the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s (GCP) congestion charge proposals, which everybody – your correspondent included – basically announced as dead on arrival last year.

When I wrote, back in December, that “obviously a stake will be driven through its heart eventually,” it wasn’t because I’m some sort of genius superforecaster; on the contrary – the key word there was “obviously”.

But I also predicted that “a more sensible compromise will be agreed on”, and I’m not so sure about that bit any more. My worry is that, by ploughing on with the clearly flawed original plan for so long, the GCP has allowed opinions on both sides to become so deeply entrenched that a trade-off – be it peak-time charging, or any other workaround – is no longer viable. You only have to look at the Conservatives’ success in the recent King’s Hedges by-election – a result that would otherwise have been about as likely as electing Darth Vader head of the Rebel Alliance – to see what a wedge issue this has become.

Which is a shame, as Cambridge clearly has a very big and very pressing traffic problem to solve, the solution to which may well involve some sort of congestion charge. Just maybe not one that penalises you for parking in your own drive, or for driving out of the city. But I suppose, in these bitterly divided times, sensible compromise just isn’t very fashionable.

Where does one 52-year-old man’s midlife crisis end, and the nation’s begins?
Where does one 52-year-old man’s midlife crisis end, and the nation’s begins?

Add the fractious ULEZ row currently going in London to our own pitch battles, and it’s hard not to get a sense that, even as half of Europe is literally on fire, environmentalists are currently losing the PR war.

Clearly – and I say this as a longtime financial supporter of Greenpeace – the idiots of Just Stop Oil aren’t helping. (Though, as someone pointed out on Twitter, whatever you think about JSO, they’re excellent at getting tickets for things.) But I wonder if a more existential malaise is also creeping in: a sense that the climate battle is already lost. And that, if even if it wasn’t, we as individuals don’t really have the power to do much about it.

If I’m honest, I’ve been guilty of this defeatism myself – about climate change, and everything else. Because it does just feel like everything’s broken beyond repair, doesn’t it?

But is that a symptom of an exhausted electorate? Or just a symptom of one exhausted 52-year-old man? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot this week, as every time I pass the bottom of the stairs, I see the pile of Lib Dem leaflets and letters I’m supposed to deliver. And I will deliver them, I promise. But more out of duty than burning political conviction. (I’m not sure I’m even still a member of the Liberal Democrats. I probably am – but only because I’m terrible at remembering to cancel direct debits.)

Of course, the problem with being a 52-year-old man in a country that’s gone to the dogs is that there’s no easy way of working out where your own midlife crisis ends, and the nation’s begins. So easiest just to assume that we’re both knackered.

‘The Streisand effect’ is ‘an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing awareness of that information’.
‘The Streisand effect’ is ‘an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing awareness of that information’.

Every day’s a school day, and last week it was former Tory MP Antoinette Sandbach’s turn to learn the hard way about ‘the Streisand effect’.

For those who’ve not been following the story, it began when a third-year PhD history student at St Catharine’s College, Malik Al Nasir, named Ms Sandbach as a descendant of the merchants who’d enslaved his ancestors.

Rather than take this on the chin, or issue an apology, Ms Sandbach instead threatened to sue the University of Cambridge – which in turn led to the story blowing up all over the media.

Fine, you say, but where does Barbra Streisand come into all this? Nowhere, really, other than it being a good example of ‘the Streisand effect’ – which the internet defines as ‘an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing awareness of that information’. In Babs’ case, it was an attempt to have a picture of her Malibu residence removed from an obscure website documenting images of Californian coastal erosion, which no-one had really bothered looking at – until she tried to get it taken down.

Everyone following this? Good. Anyway, Antoinette Sandbach has now – inevitably – apologised for “for the acts of my ancestors” in relation to the slave trade. So I guess we can chalk that up as another one for the list of ‘things that would have been a lot easier if people had just done what needed doing in the first place’.

The new East of England Co-op store in Waterbeach. Picture: Richard Marsham
The new East of England Co-op store in Waterbeach. Picture: Richard Marsham

In other learning points, The East of England Co-op – which has just opened its first Cambridgeshire store in Waterbeach – is not to be confused with The Co-op, which has stores all over the East of England. Everyone clear on that? Because I’m sure the staff never get tired of pointing it out to idiots who try to use their Co-op card in there. Or so I – ahem – imagine, anyway.

September offers a brief interlude between the tourists leaving and the students arriving, when Cambridge people get the city to themselves.
September offers a brief interlude between the tourists leaving and the students arriving, when Cambridge people get the city to themselves.

Ah, September. Possibly my favourite month of the year in Cambridge: a brief interlude between the tourists leaving and the students arriving, when we get the city to ourselves.

The weather’s usually quite nice, too. Except, after the washout summer, it seems this year we’re in for a full-on September heatwave.

That’s basically what summer is these days, isn’t it? A mix of rain and extreme heat, with nothing in between. Whatever happened to weather that’s just… you know, nice?

Don’t write in, I know what happened: climate change happened. And you’d hope that might be enough to make us all think seriously about changing the unsustainable ways in which we live.

But it won’t, of course.

Read more from Paul every month in the Cambridge Independent.



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